Enterprises, nowadays, provide dedicated customer sales and service support to existing/potential customers (hereinafter referred to as ‘customers’) in order to improve chances of sale and/or improve customer interaction experience.
The provisioning of sales and service support to the customers may be facilitated through various resources, such as for example applications, which are configured to maintain interaction flow information associated with customer interactions in order to provide seamless support to the customers.
Typically, conventional applications use either a state machine or explicit rules or conditions for representing interaction flow information associated with customer interactions.
In case of usage of state machines for representing interaction flow information, a persistent connection between a client (for example, a customer) and a server (associated with the enterprise) has to be maintained for every interaction session in order to track interaction flow information and provide seamless support to the customer. Persistent connections are also referred to herein as stateful connections.
It is often difficult to maintain and provide stateful connections or to reconnect the customer to the same server if there occurs a turn in the connection or if the connection is disengaged. Restarting the interaction with the customer may ruin an interaction experience for the customer, as the customer may have to first wait in a queue to get connected to a server and thereafter repeat his or her concern to a customer support representative. In many example scenarios, the customer may exit the interaction, perhaps never to return.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide assistance to the customer in an efficient and seamless manner. Further, there is a need to maintain interaction flow information associated with online customer interactions while precluding the need to maintain persistent or stateful connections. Furthermore, there is a need to provide support for long running customer interactions, which are currently difficult to support on account of challenges in maintaining stateful connections.